The Stakes of Dictee

when I was in college, Dictee was the most infamous book I hadn’t read. Multilingual, feral, refusing to explain itself, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s book whis­pered its secrets only to the initiated. When I opened the cover, I saw Greek Muses, calligraphy, photographs of saints and execu­tions, and, most terrifying of all, prepositions. Even for its acolytes, Dictee remains an elusive oracle. One well-known poet wrote that she taught the book by having her students write down everything they did not understand.

Contrary to popular belief, reading Dictee is possible. Having since become a committed member of the cult, I wanted to write a simple introduction to this most impossible of tomes. The key is to not be intimidated by the book’s impenetrability but to notice instead how you can always feel its emotional urgency even when you don’t understand it, a cool heat glowing like plasma construct­ing a scar. Cha’s baroque references—whether to Korean history, Greek poetry, Christian theology, or Daoism—were not intellec­tual games. They were tools to help her answer a question whose stakes were highly personal. The animating problem of Dictee, and the central trauma of Cha’s life, came from being severed from her home as a child refugee.

Born in Busan during the Korean War, Cha migrated to Hawaii and then San Francisco as an adolescent. She escaped a conflict in which the United States dropped more bombs than during all of World War II, but what she lost was incalculable. “The content of my work has been the realization of the imprint, the inscription etched from the experience of leaving, the experience of America,” she wrote in a National Endowment for the Arts application. Though a recent New York Times obituary characterizes her work as exploring Asian American identity, Dictee was ignored for almost a decade by most Asian American Studies scholars, whose social realist preferences fostered an allergy to Cha’s esoterica. And Cha had little investment in America. She saw herself as losing a home­land, rather than gaining a new one. Her central question was not the substance of her identity but the problem of not possessing one. Rather than reading Dictee as a riddle to be solved, we must look for its pleasures, the foremost of which is love.